Vegetable and fruit exports set to beat annual export target by end of September

Vietnam’s vegetable and fruit export is anticipated to far surpass the $3-billion target for this year, with thanh long (dragon fruit) and banana among the key drivers.

Fresh thanh long fruit has grown into one of the major export fruits of Vietnam

A few days after leaving Vietnam, the fresh Dragon fruit (thanh long) shipment of privately-held Hoang Phat Fruit Company Limited based in Chau Thanh district in the Mekong Delta province of Long An, arrived to a major fruit market in Sydney.

According to company director Nguyen Khac Huy, this first batch consisted of 600 boxes (each weighing five kilogrammes) and was transported to Australia by air. In the near future the products would be shipped to Australia to reduce costs.

Fresh thanh long has grown into a major export fruit for Vietnam.

Last year, the fruit generated Vietnam $350 million in export value just from the Chinese market.

Australia has recently become the latest official export market of Vietnamese thanh long after nearly a decade of negotiations. Thanh long is the third Vietnamese fruit having visibility in this market, after litchi and mango.

“At guaranteed quality, Vietnamese thanh long fetches a good price in Australia, as currently the off-season fruits fetch AUD30 ($24) per kilogramme,” said Nguyen Thi Hoang Thuy, chief representative of Vietnam Trade Office in Australia.

Banana, another specialty fruit of Vietnam, has also witnessed rising orders from foreign partners, even in the world’s markets like Japan, and most recently from China and Cambodia.

According to a source at local private group Hoang Anh Gia Lai, two months after harvest season, their products are now present on supermarket shelves across China’s big cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, through major local distributers Dechang Fruit and Tai He Fruit.

The group is set to export 14 containers of bananas a day, which mostly go to China.

Since the harvest season, Hoang Anh Gia Lai has exported 198 containers of bananas, equal to 4,040 tonnes, at a price averaging $630 per tonne.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development’s recent statistics show that Vietnam earned more than $2.3 billion from vegetable and fruit exports in the first eight months of this year, up 46.5 per cent on-year.

Though September is yet to be over, the export value of this product group is expected to surpass $2.6 billion, which is about $200 million more than the whole 2016 export value.

With this figure, fruit and vegetable exports have became the group with the fastest pace of growth in the agricultural basket, and is likely to surpass the $3-billion export value target set for 2017.

Speeding up administrative reform, organising more investment promotion activities and focusing resources on upgrading infrastructure are the main measures planned by the central province of Thanh Hoa this year to support businesses operating in its Nghi Son Economic Zone (EZ).